Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.
After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.
What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves?
XX.
Like most other county towns Lewes had many mansions. These in olden times were the winter residences of nobles and squires, and, at their death, of their relicts, for the women always survived the men. It was considered in those days that the taste of port wine struck the highest note on the palatal gamut, and that gout, though painful, was a distinction. The best lives seldom exceeded sixty-nine. The vesical and gall compartments at that age, generally, had completed their mineralogical collection, and death was not pleasant.
Many of these mansions had the charms of not having been decorated or repaired for a hundred years, whence they looked much the same as when inhabited by the dowagers of bygone generations. So sensible were some of the later occupants of this, that they preserved them in their pristine state, and sat in them in old armchairs till they imagined themselves to be ancestors; and in an instance or two donned the pigtail to complete the illusion. So honourable was this emblem, that no tradesman, however mean his calling, could wear it without being spoken of as the old gentleman, and he doubtless felt himself to be such, though he might be serving a customer with a jar of spermaceti oil.
As aforesaid, Gideon Mantell was an inhabitant of Lewes, struggling for fame by his researches within the chalk strata, and for a livelihood by his practice as a surgeon and apothecary, in which he had a fair amount of success, no doubt due to his great abilities, but in the estimation of many to the flash of his surroundings. His gig and groom were models as they waited at his door. His coat of arms embraced your vision as it shone in the fan-light and whispered of greatness within. He was tall, graciously graceful, and flexible, a naturalist, realizing his own lordship of the creation.
Mantell had a brother in his business, a man, short and deformed, of a quiet, obliging manner. His name was Joshua. He had a son who also made himself heard in later times from the wilds of New Zealand, as a successful scientific explorer.